Phonation is a fundamental feature of human communication. Control of phonation in the context of speech-language disturbances has traditionally been considered a characteristic of lesions to subcortical structures and pathways. Evidence suggests however, that cortical lesions may also implicate phonation. We carried out acoustic and perceptual…

Many differences in brain activity have been reported between persons who stutter (PWS) and typically fluent controls during oral reading tasks. An earlier meta-analysis of imaging studies identified stutter-related regions, but recent studies report less agreement with those regions. A PET study on adult dextral PWS (n = 18) and matched fluent…

Children with congenital left hemisphere damage due to perinatal stroke are capable of acquiring relatively normal language functions despite experiencing a cortical insult that in adults often leads to devastating lifetime disabilities. Although this observed phenomenon is accepted, its neurobiological mechanisms are not well characterized. In…

The role of attentional control in lexical ambiguity resolution was examined in two patients with damage to the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and one control patient with non-LIFG damage. Experiment 1 confirmed that the LIFG patients had attentional control deficits compared to normal controls while the non-LIFG patient was relatively…

Dysarthria following surgical resection of childhood posterior fossa tumour (PFT) is most commonly documented in a select group of participants with mutism in the acute recovery phase, thus limiting knowledge of post-operative prognosis for this population of children as a whole. Here we report on the speech characteristics of 13 cases seen…

We assessed the relationship between brain structure and function in 10 individuals with specific language impairment (SLI), compared to six unaffected siblings, and 16 unrelated control participants with typical language. Voxel-based morphometry indicated that grey matter in the SLI group, relative to controls, was increased in the left inferior…

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate the neural processing characteristics associated with word retrieval abilities after a phonologically-based treatment for anomia in two stroke patients with aphasia. Neural activity associated with a phonological and a semantic task was compared before and after treatment with…

The nature and frequency of speech production errors in neurodegenerative disease have not previously been precisely quantified. In the present study, 16 patients with a progressive form of non-fluent aphasia (PNFA) were asked to tell a story from a wordless children's picture book. Errors in production were classified as either phonemic,…

Objective: Functional MRI was used to determine differences in patterns of cortical activation between children who suffered perinatal left middle cerebral artery (MCA) stroke and healthy children performing a silent verb generation task. Methods: Ten children with prior perinatal left MCA stroke (age 6-16 years) and ten healthy age matched…

Objective: Functional MRI was used to determine differences in patterns of cortical activation between children who suffered perinatal left middle cerebral artery (MCA) stroke and healthy children performing a silent verb generation task. Methods: Ten children with prior perinatal left MCA stroke (age 6-16 years) and ten healthy age matched…

Clinical and imaging studies suggest that the cerebellum is involved in language tasks, but the extent to which slowed language production in cerebellar patients contributes to their poor performance on these tasks is not clear. We explored this relationship in 18 patients with cerebellar degeneration and 16 healthy controls who completed measures…

This paper explores how the test-retest reliability is modulated by different groups of participants and experimental tasks. A group of 12 healthy participants and a group of nine stroke patients performed the same language imaging experiment twice, test and retest, on different days. The experiment consists of four conditions, one audio condition…

Patients with conduction aphasia have been characterized as having a short-term memory deficit that leads to relative difficulty on span and repetition tasks. It has also been observed that these same patients often get the gist of what is said to them, even if they are unable to repeat the information verbatim. To study this phenomenon…

The function of suppression of context-inappropriate meanings during lexical ambiguity resolution was examined in 25 adults with prefrontal cortex damage (PFCD) localized to the left (N = 8), right (N = 6), or bilaterally (N = 11); and 21 matched Controls. Results revealed unexpected inverse patterns of suppression between PFCD and Control groups,…

This research studied one aspect of pragmatic language processing, the ability to understand metaphorical language, to determine whether patients with Parkinson disease (PD) are impaired for these abilities, and whether cognitive resource limitations/fronto-striatal dysfunction contributes to these deficits. Seventeen PD participants and healthy…